Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900(27 Cultural History & Literary Imagination)

The relationship between biological thought and literature, and between science and culture, has long been an area of interest by no means confined to literary studies. The Darwin Anniversary celebrations of 2009 added to this tradition, inspiring a variety of new publications on the cultural reception of Darwin and Darwinism. With a fresh scope that includes but also reaches beyond the «Darwinian» legacy, the essays in this volume explore the range and diversity of interactions between biological thought and literary writing in the period around 1900. How did literature uniquely shape the constitution and communication of scientific ideas in the decades after Darwin? Did literary genres dangerously distort, or shed critical light upon, the biological theories with which they worked? And what were the ethical and social implications of those relationships? With these broad questions in mind, the contributors consider the biological embeddedness of human nature, perspectives on sexual desire, developments in racial thinking and its political exploitation, and poetic engagements with experimental psychology and zoology. They also range across different literary traditions, from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, to Britain and the USA. Biological Discourses provides a rich cross-section of the contested relationship between literature and biological thought in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures.

Table of Contents:
CONTENTS: Robert Craig/Ina Linge: Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language? – Staffan Müller-Wille: Legacies of Evolution – Elena Borelli: The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian Fin de Siècle – Anahita Rouyan: Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Late Victorian (Mis)Representations of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – Pauline Moret-Jankus: Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French Literature – Godela Weiss-Sussex: The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency: Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911) – William J. Dodd: Darwin’s Imperialist Canvas: Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938) as Cultural History in the Shadow of National Socialism – Heike Bauer: Constructions of Desire – Michael Eggers: Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella Der Kuss von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction of Mosses – Charlotte Woodford: Biology, Desire, and a Longing for Heimat in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and Her Essay «Gedanken über das Liebesproblem» (1900) - Linda Leskau: Botanical Perversions: On the Depathologization of Perversions in Texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers – Cyd Sturgess: (Re-)Constructing the Boundaries of Desire: Sexual Inversion and Sapphic Self-Fashioning in Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (1937) – David Midgley: Projections of Otherness – Aisha Nazeer: Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the Degenerate, Racial «Other»: Reading the Abject in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) – Michael Wainwright: Narratives of Helminthology: Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Bram Stoker, and The Lair of the White Worm (1911) – David Midgley: A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in Robert Müller’s Novel Tropen (1915) – Sarah Cain: Attention and Efficiency: The Experimental Psychology of Modernism – David Wachter: Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908 – Robert Craig: The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the Creaturely Self in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).

About the Author :
Robert Craig is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg in Germany. He holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis examined the dialectic of nature and self in the work of the modernist author Alfred Döblin (2016). He has also published articles on Günter Grass and on the philosophy of social networking technologies. His work has been funded by the AHRC and the DAAD. Ina Linge is Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis focused on the performance of queer livability in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings, c.1900–1933 (2016). She has published articles on fin-de-siècle and modernist literature and culture, and the interdependence of sexology and autobiography. Her work has been funded by the AHRC, the MHRA, and the Wellcome Trust.